Visualizations as a Basis for Agile Software Process Improvement

Software projects have usually a lot of software engineering data available in different kinds of repositories. This data can be mined and used for software process improvement purposes. In general, agile methodologies emphasize reflection, making problems visible, and learning from the past. As the human mind is powerful in interpreting visual representations, visualizations could help in recognizing problems and areas of improvement in an agile software development process. In this paper an action research approach was taken to carry out software process improvement in an industry project. The research resulted in a visualization of the issue management system's data. The visualizations were a tool to identify problems in the development process and to make them visible for all stakeholders. The results show that this kind of visual approach can be used successfully to point out problems in the process. The visualizations form a basis for communication on possible software process improvement.